This line from the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem 'As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame', which I looked at in a recent post, came to the fore in a conversation last week with a friend in California. I met this man in an online philosophy class, run by the admirable Daniel Fincke, whose blog and classes I heartily recommend.
Richard was a psychotherapist for many years, treating primarily addicts, and is committed, in character and action, to helping others. One of his friends described him as 'the sort of person who speaks to others not to feel better about himself, but to make them feel better about themselves'. This is true. He has that quality. How he does is it not through platitudes and blandishments but by gaining a sense of the other and intuiting through his insight what they actually need in that moment, rather than what he thinks they need. It may seem a subtle distinction conceptually, but it is a huge one in reality.
He says that at an early age he realised that he wanted to be of service and he has enacted that volition through both his profession and his personal life. He 'looks after' people, checking up on them during lockdown; he runs an atheist group which offers both food for the homeless and education within communities to support those who wish to 'come out' as atheists.
Enough of the panegyric, though it is sincere. The point of it is to show an example of a person whose character is made manifest in his actions.
We were talking about this because in our philosophy class we had worked on Aristotle. My own reading lately has included various Aristotelians - among them Philippa Foot and Alasdair MacIntyre, whose After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory I am listening to for the second time. Just as the first time round, I made little sense of the first third of the book, but am just up to where he begins addressing the social codes expressed in Homeric verses, Icelandic sagas and Ulster epics. In these texts, character is entirely displayed through action. You see the mind of a person through what they do. And, with the heroes, is and ought are seamlessly connected. The characters express their virtues in their actions.
The virtues in these contexts tend to be primarily courage and fidelity. A character attains honour through these excellences. Importantly, they are not moral values - they are societal ones, fitting for the essentially tribal and rather warlike communities in which the stories are set. Both the word 'moral' and the word 'ethical' come from roots that referred to entirely social values and customs. The somewhat different conception of morality as something transcendent rather than socially determined came later. And led to the ongoing debates about whether morality can be consistently and universally defined. Is there a concept of 'the good' as 'real' as the mathematical concept π?
I'll leave that debate as I really don't understand either the intricacies or the implications.
Back to Aristotle. He too does not refer to morality, for which there is no word in Greek. He refers to arête, which means something like 'excellence'. A runner displays her excellence in speed when running. A potter displays his excellence in making pots. A knife's excellence is its sharpness. A man's excellence is manifested in how well he acts as a rational social animal. For this, he develops the virtues, through education and practical experience and the application of phronesis (practical wisdom), as related in a previous post.
Aristotle's virtues are a mean between two extremes, neither of which would be beneficial. So, generosity lies between meanness and prodigality; courage between cowardice and recklessness and so on. It all seems eminently sensible. What is interesting is that the obligation is more of an aim - to be the best you can be. The behaviours come through training and self-discipline, and become habitual. They lead to one's effectiveness as a rational social animal and thus to one's fulfilment as a human (see the consideration of this concept in yesterday's post). But he seems to evaluate character from a pragmatic and developmental point of view, rather than from an abstract code of externalised moral claims.
Of course, he was looking at life from the perspective of one in an elite: a free man in a relatively small community. People were expected to obey the laws of the polis, but free men also had the responsibility to develop the virtues.Slaves, one assumes, acted as they were told and women followed a different social code that allowed for little self-actualisation. The actions of his small group of free men could be witnessed and monitored; while the framework of values (excellences befitting a rational social animal) didn't see outside its structure to value the freedom of slaves or the equality of women. To that extent, society still limited freedom. But then, changing beliefs is a tricky process.
When societies get bigger, and other values that take into account humanity at large rather than just free Athenian men become established, it seems inevitable that such abstracted concepts as 'liberty' and 'equality' require different normative practices. Hence Immanuel Kant's hugely influential 'categorical imperative'. Yet, as Elizabeth Anscombe pointed out, without a divine law-giver, how do such concepts transition from preferences to obligations? Aristotle had his polis; various societies have their own laws; religious communities have their doctrines; but what about the wider concepts that we tend to regard as part of 'morality'?
This is a hard question - so much so that there is no universal agreement as to an answer, with deontology (like Kant's categorical imperatives), consequentialism (utilitarianism), social contract theory, evolutionarily rooted morality and various other frameworks adopted by some and discounted by others. Moral relativism and value pluralism attempt to encompass differing yet often valid moral schemes. Susan Wolf distinguishes between moral obligations and moral claims. Dan Fincke is developing his own theory of ethics.
It seems to me that situation does play a role: it might be right to lie when hiding a refugee from a mob, but not in other circumstances, to take an obvious example. Yet what if the refugee were a serial rapist and the mob were the police? You need to be sure of your onions. Aristotle explains that what might be the virtue of generosity in one situation could be the vice of meanness in another and the alternative vice of prodigality in a third - hence the need for practical wisdom. But then, situation can distract us from benevolent action: you may be willing to destroy your expensive outfit to rescue a drowning child you do not know from a pond, so why aren't you willing to spend the same sum to save the life of a starving child on the other side of the world? The child you see has more valence to you than the child you don't. Can that devaluation of a life be ethical?
There are so many examples of how our emotions, our biases, our ignorance and our habits can lead us to make what another might see as bad moral choices. Can we be blamed for our failures to know everything that we need to know to get it right? And, is there only ever one right answer? Doesn't it depend on what you put most store by? Freedom or equality, justice or mercy?
If everyone agrees on one code, say preferring justice to mercy and so on, then the answer about what you should do in your society comes down to following a simple code. Easy. And yet this inevitably means that some entirely moral demands are permanently and consistently ignored. So, surely, there has to be a place for flexibility, for consideration, for weighing up one solution against others. And the only way that can work is if all stake-holders have a broad conception of the good and are fulfilled by enacting it. Back to good old Aristotle, albeit a twenty-first century version?
Maybe. Susan Neiman, in her book Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists, claims that a combination of rules and reason is required. I think Fincke is working along similar lines. She states that while rules can be taught, judgment can't. She does not imply that some are incapable of developing judgment, hers is not an elitist claim: she is saying that it comes through maturity and experience as well as education. It is of a different category. A skill rather than a fact. One has to invest in developing it, with time, practice and self-discipline, exactly as Aristotle counseled. One has to be able to judge that one is getting good guidance in learning how to judge and be able to judge one's progress - such circularity can make a practice challenging. What's more, as we learn we will make mistakes, totter and fall - but we have to have the courage to keep on trying, otherwise, we will be like a terror stricken baby upset by falling over, who will never learn to walk.
Growing up as moral creatures demands that we take responsibility, show courage and persist. Not that we give up and just absorb the rules of the day.
NOTES
To explain the picture, read the poem 'Pike' by Ted Hughes. Like GMH, Hughes celebrates the selfness of creatures in the natural world, their unique qualities that fit them to their environment. The pike shows its excellence in being a pike.
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